History

FUDcon 2008 was an excellent event. During the conference, a session on secondary arches was presented and there was an excellent effort made to reach out to new arches.

After several months of bootstrapping as of June 2009 we've reached a state where we have most packages built from current Fedora rawhide CVS. There are still around ~500 failures, most of which are related to java and ocaml dependencies (ocaml is not available on s390x).

News of September 2010: We're now getting really close to Rawhide and we have a working install tree available thats basically based on current Fedora 14. Previously we only provided a hercules images as well as a tarball from a root FS as installs weren't possible. We still provide those, but now you can do your own installs again, too!

For those interested in trying it out you access everything needed from here:

size_t is alias for unsigned long on s390, so the assumption size_t == unsigned int fails here, seen in C++ code using templates

s390 (31-bit) arch has 2 GB address space and it can be too small when building large C++ applications with debug information enabled, such builds can fail in the final link with errors like "Final link failed: exhausted memory" => the workaround is to disable debug information (remove -g from CXXFLAGS)